how to report "Facility Net Purchased Electric Energy" when PV is not specified?

It seems that Facility Net Purchased Electric Energy is not reported in the csv or sql output files when there is no PV module specified. My understanding is that this is due to the absence of generator object.

However, Net Electricity From Utility is still shown in the html report:

Although Net Electricity From Utility can be manually calculated as the sum of the electricity used by lights and equipment in this case, may I ask if there is a way to "force" EnergyPlus to report its value in the csv and sql files?

3 Answers

If you're using the Output:SQLite object to write EnergyPlus outputs to an SQLite file, then you should set the Option input field to 'SimpleAndTabular' to include time-series and tabular reports found in the HTML file. After doing that, you should be able to find within the SQL file the Net Electricity From Utility output that you highlighted above.

Each Output:Meter option also has a reciprocal Output:Meter:Cumulative object in the .mdd output file. If you add a cumulative meter, that will show a running total of electricity use instead of only electricity use for your chosen reporting frequency (timestep, hourly, etc.) in the variables output CSV file that contains Output:Variable results, as well as the meter output CSV file EnergyPlus generates with the same name as your input IDF file.

However, I didn't find the Facility Net Purchased Electric Energy output variable in the .sql output file following your suggestion by adding the following line in the IDF file:

Output:SQLite, SimpleAndTabular;

... and it seems Facility Net Purchased Electric Energy is not shown in the sql database when it's opened and queried in SQLiteStudio.

Nevertheless, as your suggested, once the purchased electricity related variables are specified through output:variable and output:meter, they are shown in the sql database, although I haven't figured out how the cumulative values are calculated and reported.

I think you can do this by putting it as a request variable in the meters output (I know meters has building total electricity and other options similar to that). I am not sure if that is what you are looking for. It will report in the meters file and I think in the SQL file but not 100% about that.